Episodes

Vermont has been thrust to the center of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. On April 14, Mohsen Mahdawi, a student at Columbia University and a legal permanent resident of the U.S. who lives in the Upper Valley of Vermont, traveled to Colchester for his naturalization interview, the final step in becoming an American citizen. Mahdawi was born in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has lived in the U.S. for a decade and holds a green card. Mahdawi has been a Palestinian rights activist...

Journalist Garrett Graff is sounding increasingly urgent alarms about America’s slide into authoritarianism. He said that what is happening under the Trump administration is not a constitutional crisis, which “normally means that there's some sort of tension in the system, disagreements between the two branches.” Instead, he insisted that the tension is absent because “what we are seeing is a Congress that is willingly abdicating many of its constitutional and statutory authorities to the Presi...

Dr. Mark Levine retires as Vermont’s health commissioner this week after an eight year tenure marked by historic events. Dr. Levine is best known as the steady hand guiding Vermont’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which by many measures was one of the most successful in the nation. Vermont had the second lowest Covid fatality rate, after Hawaii. According to the Vermont Department of Health, 1,283 people died from the Covid pandemic in Vermont. During the dark days of lockdown in 2020 and 2...

This Vermont Conversation was originally published on May 15, 2024. Nicholas Kristof has been an eyewitness to some of the most iconic political and social transformations of modern times. As a reporter and columnist for the New York Times for the last four decades, Kristof has been telling searing stories about revolutions, genocides, and the impact of global inequality. His work has garnered the top prizes in journalism, including two Pulitzer Prizes. The first was in 1990 for his coverage of...

In the late 1960s, Will Patten was living in Berkeley, California, attending antiwar protests and shaking his first against capitalism and greedy businessmen. Today, at the age of 80, Patten is a true believer in capitalism and a successful businessman. He tells the story of his odyssey in a new book, “Rescuing Capitalism: Vermont Shows the Way.” Will Patten grew up on a dairy farm in southern Vermont in the 1950s. After receiving a bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University, Patten atte...

Americans have come to assume that heavy medical debt, unaffordable housing and lack of quality child care are normal features of life. Is there another way? Journalist Natasha Hakimi Zapata traveled the world to find out how other countries are solving problems that plague the United States. From housing, climate change and public education, to addiction and health care, Hakimi Zapata found innovative and affordable approaches that do better. She reports on her globetrotting investigation in h...

In Donald Trump’s world, friends and enemies trade places with breathtaking speed. Consider the case of Ukraine. President Joe Biden hailed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “the man of the year” and pledged that the U.S. “will not walk away from Ukraine” in its war against Russia, which attacked Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014, and launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Last week, President Donald Trump called Zelensky “a dictator,” falsely blamed Ukraine for starting t...

Mirna Valerio, aka The Mirnavator, would like you to join her outside her comfort zone. That’s where I found her when we were both backcountry skiing at Bolton Valley recently. I immediately recognized her from Instagram, where she has 165k followers at @themirnavator. But when I called her an “influencer,” she quickly corrected me. She said she prefers “possibility model.” Valerio, 49, is a former school teacher and author of the acclaimed blog, Fat Girl Running. The resident of Winooski is n...

Is President Donald Trump staging a coup? “It's certainly an attempted coup, for sure,” Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt, told The Vermont Conversation. As Trump and billionaire Elon Musk tear through Washington firing thousands of federal workers and shuttering federal agencies, Balint has been drawn out of the halls of Congress to protest in the streets. She joined Congressional Democrats in front of the Department of Education to denounce taking “money away from our kids to give it to billionaires,”...

Trudy fled her home in Africa in fear for her life. Her “crime” was supporting a candidate for president who was running against the incumbent leader. As her friends and family were being kidnapped, tortured and killed, Trudy decided to save herself and her 1 year old daughter. Seven years ago, she left her country. She arrived in the U.S., applied for and was granted political asylum, and is now a permanent resident in Vermont. Citing concerns about the safety of her relatives, Trudy asked to b...

President Trump’s gusher of executive orders upending government and targeting vulnerable people is spreading fear and anxiety. In just the last week, Trump has issued orders that would ban gender-affirming health care, effectively close the US Agency for International Development and threaten to close the federal Department of Education, fire career federal prosecutors, freeze some $3 trillion in federal grants, end birthright citizenship, block people from seeking asylum, and construct additio...

Numerous refugees living in Vermont have lost support for food, rent and other basic needs after a funding freeze imposed by the Trump administration. Refugee assistance organizations lost access to federal funds on Monday, only to have a judge block the order on Tuesday, and have the government rescind the order on Wednesday. The situation has caused confusion and panic among newly arrived refugees, who are legal immigrants who often arrive here with nothing. The federal refugee program assist...

Donald Trump launched his second term as president this week by enacting executive orders authorizing mass deportations, curtailing the rights of LGBTQ+ people, withdrawing from climate accords and pardoning his supporters who assaulted Capitol police officers. Flanked by an assortment of the richest men on Earth, Trump's inauguration vividly symbolized the dawn of a new age of oligarchs. This has many people — including the nearly two-thirds of Vermonters who voted against Trump — in despair. ...

The 2024 election was a political tsunami that washed across the country and Vermont. The Green Mountain State led the national anti-incumbent wave: More Democrats lost seats in Vermont than in any other state, with more than two dozen Democratic state lawmakers losing their re-election bids. Though Democrats still retain the majority in the State House, the election erased the Democratic supermajorities enjoyed in both chambers of the Vermont legislature. In addition, Republican John Rodgers w...

Myra Flynn performs on many stages, shape shifting between music and journalism. She is an accomplished songwriter andsinger, performing soul, jazz and indie pop with five albums to her credit. She is also a journalist with a unique voice in Vermont’s media landscape. She is executive producer and host of Homegoings, a program on Vermont Public that launched in 2021 and brands itself as a “righteous space for art and race.” She has also worked as a features reporter at the Burlington Free Press....

The acclaimed author Julia Alvarez is the longtime writer in residence at Middlebury College. Her novels include, “How The García Girls Lost Their Accents” and “In the Time of the Butterflies.” She's also a prize-winning poet, children's author and essayist. Alvarez’s most recent novel, “The Cemetery of Untold Stories,” was published in 2024 and will be published in paperback in April 2025. Alvarez’s family was forced to flee from the Dominican Republic to the U.S. when her father was implicat...

This Vermont Conversation was originally published on Nov. 23, 2022. Santa Claus is coming to town. But the person shimmying down the chimney may not be the rotund, bearded white man who has long played the role of St. Nick. “Santa Camp” is a new documentary from HBO Max about an effort to diversify who represents Santa Claus. The story begins at the annual summer camp of the New England Santa Society, which represents more than 100 Christmas performers. The Santas realized that they need to l...

For Noah Dines, life has been an uphill climb. And that is his dream come true. Dines, a 30 year-old Stowe local, is in the process of setting a new world record for human powered vertical feet skied in one year. The previous record had been 2.5 million feet set in 2016 by Aaron Rice, another Stowe skier. Dines broke Rice’s record in September, then surpassed his original goal of skiing 3 million feet in October, broke 1 million meters — or 3.3 million feet — in early December, and will wrap up...

Ben Jealous has a long and deeply personal perspective on the fight for social and environmental justice. Jealous was elected president and CEO of the NAACP in 2008 at the age of 35, making him the youngest person to lead America’s oldest civil rights organization. Since 2022, he has been the executive director of the Sierra Club, the first person of color to lead one of the country’s oldest and largest environmental organizations. In exploring his own history, Jealous learned that he is a des...

John Rodgers is the most interesting man in Vermont politics. And he just may be its future. The Democrat-turned-Republican who just won the race for Vermont's lieutenant governor did something that has not been done since 1815: he became lieutenant governor by defeating the incumbent lieutenant governor in a general election.al election. Rodgers’ 6,000 vote victory over sitting Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, who ran as a Progressive/Democrat, was part of a statewide backlash that ousted numerous D...

One year ago, Elizabeth Price was awoken by a phone call with news that every mother dreads: Her son, Hisham Awartani, had been shot, along with his two best friends. It was Thanksgiving 2023, and the three 20-year old college students — all of them Palestinian or Palestinian-American — were taking a walk while visiting Awartani's grandmother in Burlington. The shocking, unprovoked attack against Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Aliahmad made international news. A year later, the familie...

It has been nearly two decades since a Vermonter won a coveted Rhodes Scholarship, widely considered the most prestigious scholarship in the world. The Rhodes Scholarship pays for international students to pursue postgraduate studies for up to three years at Oxford University in England. This week, Lena Ashooh of Shelburne was named a 2025 Rhodes Scholar. She is one of 32 Rhodes Scholars chosen from the U.S. from over 3,000 students who applied. According to the Rhodes Trust, Vermont has had 43...

President-Elect Donald Trump has vowed to take revenge on his enemies. He promised to begin mass deportations of undocumented immigrants on Day 1 and to further restrict reproductive rights. And he is threatening to overturn longstanding environmental protections and public health measures. With Republicans now in control of all three branches of government in Washington, state attorneys general are being described as "a last line of defense against Trump." Vermont Attorney General Charity Cla...

America has chosen a strong man — with an emphasis on “man.” Donald Trump wagered that that a key to victory was appealing to men. His misogynist comments, his contempt for social and political norms, his embrace of authoritarian strongmen around the world was aimed at winning over men, especially young non-college educated men. It worked: the 2024 election results reflected an historic gender gap, in which most men voted for Trump, while most women voted for Vice President Kamala Harris. The ...